The star of CBS' new series Zoo talked with us about fame, why old friends are the best kind of friends, and his "gym membership for the mind."

James Wolk is not actually a James. He's a Jimmy. He's always been a Jimmy, even though back in 2010, as a twenty-five-year-old actor without much more than soap-opera and TV-movie credits to his name, he decided to start going by James professionally. This producer says to me, "You know Jimmy Stewart?" Now: I love Jimmy Stewart. I fucking love Jimmy Stewart. "Guess what he was billed as?" Lo, Jimmy Wolk became James.

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It's possible that one day he will become the kind of famous person people feel familiar enough with to call by a nickname, and it's possible that his new "summer event series" on CBS, Zoo, will be the thing that does this for him. But for now Jimmy has been a lead on enough failed shows—the 2010 double-life series Lone Star, canceled after two excellent episodes; the 2012 USA Network miniseries Political Animals; the 2013–14 Robin Williams comedy The Crazy Ones—that he's careful not to be like, This is it, this is the show, the one that will make him more than a great-looking guy on a Venice Beach boardwalk or someone occasionally recognized as Bob Benson from Mad Men.

Jimmy is great-looking, affably handsome, with hazel eyes edged by creases, evidence of a nearly permanent smile. His teeth, straight and white with outsized incisors, aren't capped. He never had braces even. Jimmy has thick eyebrows—he knows he has to be careful when he's older or those things will be crazy Mr. Miyagi bushes like his uncle's. His hairstyle was copied from his grandfather and the Elvis movies his father watched with him when he was a kid. There have been few modifications, although he no longer uses Vaseline and a combination comb/switchblade to slick it back. Jimmy's pretty masculinity is a throwback; he appears to be the only man in Venice Beach with chest hair.

Jimmy projects comfort. As he's having his picture taken for Esquire, he's comfortable handling a basketball, a bicycle, a cup of tepid iced coffee, a prop script. A busker is given twenty dollars to vacate his bongo drums and Jimmy is comfortable stepping in, slapping the skins, bobbing around, jamming with the guitarist, slipping his fingers along some nearby chimes. Jimmy is feeling his flow. When a prop is suggested that he is not comfortable with—a longboard, to be ridden down the boardwalk—Jimmy smiles. I'll be honest—I have no idea what the fuck I'd do with that. He's polite but firm about it. He is not going to look like an asshole at this shoot, because Jimmy is not an asshole.

He's polite but firm. He is not going to look like an asshole at this shoot, because Jimmy is not an

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Jimmy is an extrovert, talking to everyone during the eight-hour shoot, from the PAs to the stylist to his manager's daughter, who has a part in an upcoming production of the musical Babes in Arms, which Jimmy is very interested in. He says his motivations are selfish: If everyone feels respected in the creative process, they're more invested in it turning out well, which means Jimmy looks his best. But it's also that he just can't abide disrespect. If someone was getting picked on at high school, I would find that person and have a conversation, flipping the whole situation on its head so that the person picking on them would be like, "Wait a minute, this guy who I was thinking I'm better than is all of a sudden chatting with Jimmy?" I'd make the kid getting picked on feel like a G and the other guy feel like an idiot.

Jimmy learned the art of positive vibe setting at the women's shoe store his dad, Rob Wolk, owns in Michigan and still runs with Jimmy's sister. Jimmy was put to work there when he was ten. At thirteen, he started slipping high heels onto the feet of middle-aged women, chanting lines his father had fed him in the storeroom: They're a hot number, those shoes. Sundance Shoes was where Jimmy learned how to make a sale, where the motto was Never Come Out Empty-Handed. If he knew he didn't have the shoe the customer wanted, he would tell them he was going to get it and then bring back different options. He created needs and set moods. It's the same set of skills Jimmy employed as a party starter on the Eastern Michigan bar-mitzvah circuit between 2001 and 2008. The man can start a party.

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His friends these days are mostly people from Michigan, like his core seven, whom he has known since middle school and spends every New Year's Eve with at someplace like Tahoe or Salt Lake City just hanging out and playing beer pong. He was in a fraternity while studying theater at the University of Michigan, but it was the kind of frat that let him out of pledge activities to go star in a play, as long as he promised to come back and drink until he got sick the next night. Tonight, and most nights he's not working, Jimmy's drink is Tito's with lots of ice and lots of lime, and if it comes out without enough of either he will politely send it back for more, with a smile.

Jimmy's major onscreen talent is harnessing this charismatic earnestness, and he knows better than most when to talk and when to reveal. It may be a midwestern thing, or the self-preservation of someone who has a lot to gain, but he doesn't always come across as totally direct. Like with Zoo, an action drama based on a James Patterson book about animals turning on and hunting humans: Is the show any good? Uh, Jimmy hasn't actually seen it. Intentionally. It's a way to retain plausible deniability, because if it was bad and he knew that, he might have to start lying to people who write magazine profiles about him.

But! It's a great experience. The show's scripts are good and he's having fun and the international buyers tell him they really like it. And even though it's not, you know, Mad Men, Jimmy thinks that sometimes the shows that don't sound like they'll be the big breaks are the ones that will be. Or, at least, he knows better than most that the shows that sound like they will be the big breaks sometimes turn out not to be. And when that happens, it hurts.

It sucks.

He tries not to take it personally, because he can't control the outcome. All he can do is try to have a great creative experience and get paid and tell himself that if this one doesn't work out, he'll get another chance. He is not the first actor to fail his way through his twenties. The good thing is Clooney had, like, ten canceled shows. A million things. He literally had nine pilots that didn't go. (In reviewing the pilot of Lone Star, critics from both The New York Times and The Washington Post likened Jimmy to George Clooney, a comparison that Jimmy has clearly internalized but struggles to admit out loud without sounding like a dick. What are you supposed to say to that? All I can say is thank you.)

It's hard to process all of the hope and nerves and disappointment. Bill Burr has a bit that Jimmy likes about men dying earlier than women because they just hold it all in, but Jimmy has some outlets: a meditation app that describes itself as a "gym membership for the mind"; 6:00 a.m. runs between the streetcar tracks in New Orleans, where he's filming Zoo; surfing when he's home in Santa Monica. They're all just ways to empty his brain, to calm himself after a fight or to shut off the constant judgment of his own thoughts, standards he holds only himself to.

Life is good right now for Jimmy. Most days he goes unrecognized, and his fiancée has to point it out to him when it happens. He rents his two-bedroom apartment in downtown Santa Monica. It's in the middle of a busy shopping area, but it's just a couple blocks from the beach and has wide views of the Pacific Ocean, which Jimmy loves to watch the sun set into while walking his rottweiler-shepherd mix, Flea. He eats and drinks local. He would never drop his own name to get into a restaurant—his dad is a no-reservation kind of guy, so if Jimmy can't get a table, he's used to camping out at the bar until one becomes available. (And really, what are the odds that the host knows who Jimmy Wolk is, anyway?) Jimmy is doing just fine. Better than most. But.

At thirty he has a comfy seat in the waiting lounge of fame. He is like countless other young (though no longer quite so young) men in Los Angeles, reminding themselves that Jon Hamm didn't land Mad Men until he was thirty-four, and Kyle Chandler was forty when he took Peter Berg's call for Friday Night Lights, and who the fuck wants Zac Efron's life, anyway? They tell themselves there's no reason that they, if they work hard enough and the acting gods bestow grace upon them, can't be the ones to beat the odds. That when the right project is given unto them—no, when they take the right part, the right role to display their leading-man-ness—they, too, can enter the pantheon, or at least Vanity Fair's Oscar party. And that if this role doesn't work out, they will always get another chance. That last part is important. Opportunity is the air these actors breathe, and without it they might as well head back to wherever—Michigan, the family shoe store—empty-handed.

No need to tell Jimmy any of this. He knows. And he nods at the suggestion that with the right opportunity he could very well emerge as a leading man, a Clooney-level star, a Jimmy forever and never again a James. If he is surprised by the audacity of such a thought, especially from someone he barely knows, he does not show it—it's not like it's the first time he's been compared to Clooney. Instead, he takes a sip of his drink and compliments his dining partner on her ability to see clearly what too many others miss.

That's a very astute way of looking at it.

Jimmy smiles at her. He knows. And he changes the topic to something more pleasant.